“Oct 7 2023”

So now we know what a ‘globalised intifada’ might look like. That’s what people chanted for on the streets of London on Saturday. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada’, they yelled. And now it’s happening, in Dagestan, where last night there was a violent hounding of Israelis arriving in the country by mobs shouting ‘Free Palestine’.

What took place at the airport in Makhachkala was truly chilling. Huge numbers of people, some waving the Palestinian flag and holding anti-Israel placards, stormed the airport after hearing that a flight from Tel Aviv was on its way. They were hunting for Jews. It was a pogrom under the auspices of ‘Palestine solidarity’.

Gaza’s dense urban environment and the need to abide by the laws of war will inevitably complicate its mission to extirpate Hamas.

Nearly three weeks after Hamas’s barbaric invasion and slaughter of innocent civilians and children, Israel has yet to launch a full-scale ground operation into Gaza’s dense urban environment. This week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally announced that Israel is preparing for an invasion, and over the last two nights, Israeli troops launched ground raids into Gaza. The larger ground mission, however, was delayed to allow the U.S. to place additional missile-defense systems in the region and to try to secure the release of the more than 220 hostages taken by Hamas. Far from a sign of weakness, the pause shows that Israel’s government and armed forces are treating the situation with the responsibility and prudence that urban warfare warrants, in accordance with international law.

Sad to say, America has been here before. Even if today’s media seems to have forgotten. America is awash in protests, many of them on university campuses, supporting the savagely anti-Semitic Hamas.

The media seems baffled.

What does one wear to a massacre?

That was the bizarre question that came into my head as I prepared — and braced myself — to visit the Israeli Consulate in New York late Friday morning to watch 45 minutes of the hundreds of hours of footage collected from Hamas’ Oct. 7 bloodbath in southern Israel.

Human beings are instinctively tribal, and when we think in terms of “us” vs. “them” the temptation to dehumanize the other is hard to resist when the stakes are high.

You see this most often in war, but even in smaller things, the tendency pops up. I know plenty of people who instinctively cringe when they hear a certain accent, and of course, plenty of people assume evil of people on no basis other than skin color.

HOLIT, Israel—The wall was blackened where a rocket-propelled grenade punched a hole into Moshe Ridler’s bungalow.

“Then they threw a hand grenade into the room, to make sure he was dead,” said Eli Hazen, a volunteer collecting bodies in Holit, a kibbutz two kilometres from Gaza.

Ridler was 91, he said, and a survivor of the Holocaust.

“That Holocaust,” Hazen clarified. “He did not survive this Holocaust.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s newly appointed envoy on combating antisemitism is facing criticism for failing to speak out publicly about rising attacks and intimidation of Jews in Canada since the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Many Canadians, concerned about the upsurge in antisemitism, say they are baffled about why Deborah Lyons has so far not taken to social media to offer the Jewish community public support.

For much of the past century, Jews across Britain, North America and Europe tilted decisively to the left. The recent atrocities committed by Hamas against Israel have challenged that trend, with Jewish sensitivities inflamed in light of the growing celebration of terrorism among progressive leftists in the West.

Historically, Jews have been wary of the right — and for good reason. Not only did they fear the fascists, but also the old-school conservative establishment, which generally disdained Jews. The British Home Office used to limit Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom, and the U.S. State Department tried to block reports of the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews from reaching the United States. In most countries, Jews consistently supported mainstream left-wing parties — namely, Labour in Britain, the Socialists in France, the Democrats in America and the Liberals in Canada. Jews even played critical roles in more radical movements on the left, including the communists.

They’ll still be voting Liberal/NDP or Democrat as the case may be.

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly will call on Israel in a speech on Monday to temper its heavy bombardment of Gaza and allow for pauses in the war to permit sustained humanitarian aid to reach beleaguered Palestinian civilians.

In a wide-ranging foreign-policy address to the Economic Club in Toronto, Ms. Joly will lament that the world is engulfed in a “major international security crisis” that stretches from China and the Indo-Pacific to the war in Ukraine and the violent conflict in the Middle East. A copy of the speech was provided in advance to The Globe and Mail.

It’s mob rule and the mob is ruling.

It’s a nasty mob, one in which some people Sunday were openly carrying Hamas flags.

A rising number of prominent US figures have faced discipline over controversial public comments they have made about the Palestinian cause, as attacks by Israel on Gaza after the 7 October massacre of Israelis by Hamas fighters intensified.

David Velasco, the editor in chief of Artforum magazine, was reportedly fired after the magazine published an open letter in response to the war.

Related: US asks Qatar to ‘turn down the volume’ of Al Jazeera news coverage

Celebrated US photographer Nan Goldin and other artists have said they will no longer work with Artforum after the magazine’s termination of Velasco, the New York Times reported.

“I have never lived through a more chilling period,” Goldin, who is Jewish and had signed the open letter, said to the Times. “People are being blacklisted. People are losing their jobs.”

German -Israeli Shani Louk has been found dead. She was gang raped, tortured & murdered. Her body was dragged to Gaza to be defiled.

They phoned her mother saying she was alive & got her credit card PIN number & withdrew money. pic.twitter.com/slr3srZ6FR

— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) October 30, 2023

Israeli-German Shani Louk’s remains found, family confirms